Spices transform a shrimp dish

November 18, 2001|By Mark Bittman, New York Times News Service.

More often than not, it is the seasonings that give recipes a national identity, not the main ingredients or cooking technique. If you need convincing of this notion, here it is, in the form of a simple shrimp and tomato dish.

If you saw it, you would immediately take it for Italian, or more specifically, southern Italian or even Italian-American. It is nothing more than shrimp in tomato sauce, a combination that is served over pasta all the time.

But if you tasted it, you would give a different answer. The main ingredients are standard, the technique and appearance are standard, but the seasonings are from the other side of the Mediterranean: North Africa.

That's the lesson here: By varying the spices, you can transform the common into the exotic. Instead of garlic, red pepper, lemon and parsley, you use ginger, cumin, coriander, lime and cilantro. The difference, as you can imagine, is striking.

Fresh lime leaf, which adds a mysterious fragrance to this dish, is, unfortunately, difficult to find outside of specialty stores, and dried lime leaf is a poor substitute. If you can't find fresh lime leaf, or even if you just don't want to be bothered looking for it, use some minced lime zest, which works well. The difference is real but quite subtle; given the strength of the other spices, it is far from critical.

The cooking process is exactly as it would be for making the usual dish of seafood in tomato sauce. Sizzle the spices in oil, add the tomatoes, and simmer until they're saucy, then cook the shrimp in the sauce. It's a technique that works equally well for scallops or squid, either of which will cook in the same time as the shrimp, and a combination is delicious.

Though you might serve the Italian-style preparation over pasta, this one is better with mounds of soft white rice.